As the average human life span increases, public interest in health inevitably increases. Until now, the increase in the human life span has been due to the development of medical technology, and nowadays attempts to increase the human life span have been continually progressing by means of exercise and dietary habits. However, people may not be able to sufficiently exercise due to a complicated social structure, and thus an individual-specific health care system has been developed.
A conventional health care system requires a lot of information which contains private data, medical examination results, food intake status, caloric intake, physical fitness measurements, biological signals, daily amount of activity, caloric consumption, and so on. Furthermore, the conventional health care system gathers the information using expensive equipment. Users may be reluctant to input the information because the conventional health care system requires the users to input a lot of information, and thus the users may have difficulties in using the conventional health care system. Moreover, the conventional health care system cannot provide feedback when the information is not inputted by the users. As the system is implemented with various components, the cost of the components make the system too expensive to be widely used and the size of the components make the system too big to be carried by the users. Consequently, the conventional health care system may not correctly or consistently receive the required data, and thus correct health care may not be basically possible even though an analyzing system is excellent. The conventional health care system has some limitations such as being inconvenient to use, implementing size and costs.
A system and method for providing health information by using bodily information is disclosed in Korean Patent No. 0431923. It discloses that the system and method provide “a plurality of suitable diet information for each user by comprehensively evaluating bodily information and life patterns.” However, the life patterns are not clearly defined in the specification and only an exercise prescription corresponding to the diet information is provided based on the bodily information received from the user. Finally, the system and method provide the diet information exclusively based on the bodily information received from the user, and thus the system and method may not provide appropriate exercise prescriptions when the user does not input the bodily information.
A system and method considering life patterns of a user is disclosed in Korean Patent No. 0682900. The user may have difficulties inputting their own life patterns and periods for providing health management feedback information are not clearly mentioned. Therefore, the health management feedback information is only provided on a daily basis, and the information may not be provided at a point in time when the user is able to exercise. The system and method may not increase the amount of activity, and thus a goal of health management considering life patterns may not be effectively accomplished.
The conventional method and apparatus require the input of excessive amounts of health-related data that make them inconvenient to use, and in cases where this is substituted with an automatic input means, the product price increases due to expensive sensor components and additional related software. Even though the information is automatically acquired, the health care information is not provided in real time but is checked afterward. Therefore, the adaptability of the user in following an actual life-pattern correction program may be lowered.
The conventional method and apparatus determines signal strengths generated by motion sensors under conditions in which sensing periods are fixed, classifies various activities such as dynamic, very dynamic, and static, or divides activity patterns during the fixed periods by using a certain algorithm. For example, a pedometer manufactured by Omron and linked software for a personal computer may divide the activity patterns per hour to provide feedback to the user. However, the user may not be able to obtain any substantial meaning from the feedback data. For instance, the user may view the provided life patterns as patterns that they already know, because the activity level is estimated to be at a high level only during the morning commute, movement during lunchtime, and the evening commute. Further processes like data mining the data collected remotely, or providing feedback that is realistic enough to change life patterns even though the health manager directly looks at the provided data are beyond its ability.
In addition, Body Media simply provides sensed life patterns per minute during 24 hours, and does not provide a detailed method for providing effective feedback by applying the sensed life patterns. Although respective activity patterns (events) may be stored to provide specified feedback to the user by analyzing the sensed data, the amount of the data is too great to be analyzed by only one measuring apparatus and the apparatus may be expensive to be implemented. Further, a traffic may be increased by continually transferring the excessive data to a server, and the server collecting all of the data and analyzing trends may be burdened in maintaining and managing the received database.